In modern medical diagnosis, a number of medical imaging modalities as well as other means of acquiring measurements data from patents for the purposes of diagnosis are known, for example medical ultrasound, CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), X-ray imaging, SPECT (single photon emission photography) and PET (positron emission tomography) and ECG (electrocardiogram), to name just some examples. Therefore, a substantial amount of data is generated, often by several modalities, for one patient which may be stored within a picture archiving and communication system (PACS), or any other database. The data produced by such imaging or other diagnostic modality is called “medical study data” in this application, wherein often the data acquired from one patient in one diagnosis session is stored in one study.
Often, studies are analysed not directly after acquisition but at a later time by a specialized physician or other medical personnel. In order to review and analyze the medical study data, it is sometime required to perform computationally intensive measurements and calculations, such as segmenting images to find different compartments, fitting models to organs in the body, or, in the case of cardiac imaging calculating important parameters such as cardiac output, reflow at heart valves etc. For performing such analyses, it has been hitherto been the practice to install dedicated software on the users' devices, e.g. on their workstations, PCs or laptops. An example of such software for analysing medical ultrasound images is the product Image Arena™ by the applicant, which is a multi modality platform for image analysis, review and data management, providing a comprehensive portfolio of clinical and advanced applications for 2D (two-dimensional), 3D (three-dimensional) and 4D (four-dimensional) analysis.
Accordingly, it is necessary for medical practitioners to download and regularly update the data analysis software, and the provider of such software is required to provide different versions of the software for all prevalent operating systems, to test the software for all operating systems and to alert the users of required updates.
The patents by Heart Imaging Technologies, LLC, in particular U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,457,656, 8,166,381, and 6,934,698 provide a medical image management system to allow any conventional internet browser to function as a medical workstation. The system may be used to convert medical images from a plurality of image formats to browser-compatible format. However, this solution requires high bandwidth and a low-latency network, since the complete images in the browser-compatible format are transferred from server to client. A further system to display and facilitate image manipulation of image content via a browser disclosed in US 2014/0143298 A1, wherein a data manager formats image content to a browser-convenient format.